Safety first as insurance firm Safety National adopts Planful for FP&A

It's a familiar story — Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) of mission-critical numbers in a highly regulated industry, all dependent on highly complex yet fragile Excel spreadsheets. This was the case at Safety National, a leading specialty insurance and reinsurance provider with thousands of customers across the US. Ruby Tan, Planning and Reserving Manager, paints the picture:

Given the complexity of the insurance industry, some of our Excel files contained multiple tabs with thousands of rows of calculations. At times, it felt like I was unintentionally running a stress test on Excel!

On top of this, there was limited flexibility to customize and distribute reports, hampering communications and collaboration with colleagues in other departments. Tan cites security worries too:

Imagine having to send a monthly package to 45 departments in your organization, each with unique specificities and potentially sensitive data. Will sending an email attachment be the best approach? How much time will it take? And most importantly, how would you maintain internal controls and data security?

There had to be a better way. In January 2024, Tan's team implemented Planful's FP&A platform. Users could still work in Excel, Powerpoint or Word thanks to the Planful Spotlight feature, but now the source data was dynamically refreshed. This meant that last-minute changes to reports and presentations, which had previously been stressful, time consuming and prone to errors, could now be made with confidence. Tan comments:

With Excel [and other tools], when I had to extract the data from the system [by] copy and paste, I was so worried if I stand up and speak during a meeting, because I'm not sure, is my data consistent across all of my presentation? But now with Planful, those automations, the confidence that it built for me to give me a chance to voice out for myself, for my career, I'm so grateful for this.

Others across the organization felt similar benefits. She goes on:

Spotlight makes it easy for a new user to get up and run quickly. Second, it allows us to slice and dice the data via manual tasks like extraction, formatting and validation. Third, Spotlight enables us to use custom reports with real-time updates, all from the single source of truth for both reporting and budgeting. That means we can create, update, and present financial data, management reports, department packages, and responses to enquiries from our parent company. We are confident that our data is always current, consistent and accurate.

Time savings

Tan calculates that her team of four people have saved 660 hours annually as a result of moving to Planful, because it has automated previously manual operations such as bringing data across from the company's ERP system, or compiling emails to distribute reports. Having created various models and reports that will be reused in future years, she expects the time savings to increase to more than a thousand hours annually.

The saved time is going back into training, oversight and collaboration with other teams, as well as a better work-life balance. Business colleagues have more autonomy to work with their data, she adds:

When they have to make updates, we have empowered them as the business owner, they can book their budget within the system by themselves. They do not need to come to us and provide the information to us, and then we will need to send another email saying, 'Yeah, we received it,' and then make updates in the system for them. Now they have the autonomy by themselves...

Even with finance, [in] Spotlight, we can have the actual numbers and then the budget number together, and then we can update all the exhibits just by using Spotlight, those kind of conveniences. Before, I feel like finance is doing their own work, FP&A is doing their own work. Now we have more collaboration because we're both using the same system in other areas, and then we can help each other out.

Introducing a new platform was a big step for the company, which was founded in 1942 and is part of global insurance giant Tokio Marine Group. Tan did extensive testing — "I wanted to measure this system is really stable for us," she says — so it's unsurprising that she is taking a cautious line on AI. One obstacle is that Planful's Predict Signals anomaly detection feature requires at least three years of historical data, which the team had not yet had time to import into the platform. But she is eager to explore the opportunity to make more time savings and provide more forward-looking insights. She sums up her plans:

The future is full of possibility. We are advancing our ability to budget and report IFRS financials, expanding system integrations with our policy and claims administration system as well as the data warehouse. We are unlocking the capabilities of bringing planning data into Power BI, leveraging Planful AI and Predict Signals to revolutionize our analytics. Our goal is to utilize Planful to its fullest extent and even support data-related initiatives in other areas of the company.